Getting started

Welcome to the AAM’s interactive archive. Here is an introduction to what the archive contains and what and how you can contribute to it, as well as a few tips and suggestions.

First, a warning...

This website is crowd-sourced. It is a work-in-progress, not a finished product. The data on the site comes from lots of different sources and has not always been entered into the original databases accurately. Bear this in mind when browsing and help us to improve the site by correcting errors and typos where you spot them.

What we’ve done so far

We have brought together a collection of Second World War photographs (the Roger Freeman Collection) and data about American airmen and women, their planes, their units and their airfields and have begun linking them together to build a picture of the American experience in Britain during the Second World War.

We have structured the information on the site to make it easy to find. The result is that every entry in the archive fits into one of six categories: People, Aircraft, Place, Unit, Mission and Media.

For every person, aircraft, place, unit, mission or photograph which we have or know about, we have created a page. The strength of the website is in the connections that can be made between these pages so that, for example, from the page of a Fighter Squadron you can go to the pages of the pilots which belonged to it, and from a pilot’s page, you can go to his aircraft’s page.

What you can do

You can browse and search the site to see the information and photographs that we have already added. However, we hope that you will do more than this.

The site is unfinished. It has been created using databases belonging to a variety of organisations and individuals. There are lots of gaps and lots of work to do to enhance the pages, especially of people.

The more connections there are between entries on the site, the stronger it will be. If we can connect an airman with his unit, the aircraft he flew and the missions he took part in, then we strengthen not only his story but the stories of the entries that he’s associated with.